The New-Collar Workforce
Earning a bachelor’s degree can expand one’s mind, widen horizons, and provide a pathway to a well-paying, satisfying career. Yet for those who don’t complete four years of college, the lack of a BA or BS looms as a barrier. Millions of people are locked out of promising job opportunities because too many companies default to hiring workers with four-year degrees, even for positions that don’t require that level of education. The trend began decades ago but spiked during the Great Recession: Research by Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance shows that from 2007 to 2010, job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree increased by 10%. That number dropped somewhat as the economy recovered, but scores of jobs remain inaccessible to people who have the skills and aptitude to succeed at them—but not a college diploma.
Unnecessary degree requirements don’t just hurt workers. They also deprive companies of talent while yielding little to no benefit. Hiring managers may think that a bachelor’s degree serves as a good proxy for things like collaboration skills, a sense of initiative, and the ability to think critically, but there’s virtually no evidence to support that notion. In fact, when a team from Harvard Business School and Accenture recently analyzed “middle-skill” jobs (which require some education or training beyond high school but not a four-year degree), they found no boosts in productivity when those jobs were done by college graduates.
Companies that use the bachelor’s degree as a filter when filling positions that don’t require it are hiring inefficiently. They’re also overlooking workers they desperately need, particularly in growing fields such as tech, where the demand for people with specialized skills far outstrips the supply. At a time when many employers are struggling to fill vacancies and retain their current workforce, a gatekeeping mechanism with no proven benefit creates a competitive disadvantage.
Moreover, degree requirements undermine organizational commitments to improving racial diversity. Although U.S. Census data from 2021 shows that a majority (about 65%) of Americans who are 25 or older do not have a bachelor’s, the proportions are highest among Black Americans (72%), indigenous populations (80%), and those who identify as Hispanic or Latinx (79%). An unnecessary insistence on credentials is, in short, blocking employers’ access to a diverse, capable pool of talent, and the workers who are taking the biggest hit are those who are already marginalized.
It’s no secret that we’re living in a time of profound economic inequality. Workers and occupations are increasingly concentrated at the low and high ends of the economic ladder. The middle class in the United States is hollowing out, and a raft of research across multiple disciplines has found that this is perpetuating racial disparities, tearing the social fabric, and undermining democracy. It’s time to fix our broken approach to talent management, for the good of not just workers and companies but also society as a whole.
Companies that use the bachelor’s degree as a filter when filling positions that don’t require it are hiring inefficiently and overlooking workers they desperately need.
We three have long been deeply compelled by questions about how companies find, treat, and support the employees who are at the core of any business. Colleen directs Harvard Business School’s Race, Gender & Equity (RGE) Initiative, which aims to eradicate racial and gender-based disparities and other forms of inequality in organizations and society at large. Boris has been researching and teaching about effective hiring and retention, and about managing for diversity, equity, and inclusion, for more than 20 years, and he is a faculty affiliate at the RGE Initiative. And Ginni is a former CEO of IBM who expanded opportunities there for people of diverse backgrounds and who now serves as a cochair of OneTen, a coalition of employers committed to hiring Black workers without four-year degrees into family-sustaining jobs.
Collectively we’ve written several books that address talent, diversity, and effective management, most recently Ginni’s Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023). Together, we recently interviewed leaders in various industries about their companies’ talent management practices. What they told us confirms our own prior research and real-world experience: There’s a straightforward, practical way that firms can foster prosperity and diversity while also unlocking a huge and capable talent pool. The secret is focusing on skills.
Skills-First Hiring
Ten years ago IBM, like many other organizations, was struggling to fill some key jobs. At the same time, it was increasingly clear that the benefits of the burgeoning tech industry were not accruing equally across society. Indeed, many people were more likely to see technology as a threat to their livelihood than as a field where they could climb the economic ladder. And no wonder: Well-paying tech jobs were largely out of reach for those without a bachelor’s degree. At IBM in 2012, less than 10% of U.S.-based roles were open to such applicants, regardless of their other qualifications. Ginni, who was then the CEO, knew that a different approach was needed.
To widen its excessively narrow talent funnel, the company launched what Ginni referred to as the SkillsFirst initiative: IBM overhauled its hiring practices to create on-ramps for people who were previously overlooked and to build a pipeline of capable nondegreed workers. For any organization with the same goals, the process involves action on multiple fronts.
Building a new taxonomy of skills.
At IBM, HR teams reevaluated job descriptions and worked with business units throughout the company to find out what knowledge and expertise was needed for specific roles. Rather than assume that applicants with college degrees possessed relevant capabilities—and that those without college degrees did not—the teams studied all open positions, identified the genuinely requisite skills, and then rewrote job descriptions accordingly, emphasizing specific abilities over general credentials. For example, a cybersecurity job posting once would have listed the experience and degrees required. Now it lists desired skills and attributes and focuses on the core capabilities needed to do the job, such as being able to develop hypotheses and apply programming languages.
As companies revise job postings, they have to be careful to avoid language that might suggest a bias against applicants who don’t come from privileged backgrounds. “You can remove the degree requirement,” says Obed Louissaint, who led talent at IBM until recently, “but if you include ‘experience traveling,’ that may turn off a candidate.”
Crafting job descriptions is also best done as a joint effort, with input from HR, hiring managers, and experienced supervisors. Mindful of that, IBM created an “enterprise skills team” consisting of a dozen senior and emerging leaders who together identified the most important qualifications for a range of entry-level roles. They included hard skills that were specific to particular jobs and soft skills important in all of them. Developing and maintaining a database of this kind is vital for skills-first hiring, but according to a 2022 report by LinkedIn Learning, only 10% of organizations actually do it.
External experts can help. Cleveland Clinic, for example, worked with the diversity-strategy firm Grads of Life to analyze more than 400 roles, representing 20,000 total jobs, and then revised degree and credential requirements to remove unnecessary qualifications. The effort was so successful that the clinic expanded its skills analysis to thousands of additional roles.
Broadening the talent pool.
To develop a successful skills-first hiring practice, companies should provide on-ramps—such as apprenticeships, internships, and training programs—for people who have aptitude but are untraditional candidates. It can be tempting to frame these mechanisms as altruistic efforts or to consider them the domain of corporate social-responsibility units. But such a view is backward, according to Greg Case, the CEO of Aon, a risk management firm. He says that if business leaders are “asking how we give people access to our companies, that is the wrong question. The real question is, How can we equip ourselves to access this talent?”
Aon offered its first apprenticeship opportunities in finance, IT, and human resources—all departments that were experiencing high attrition. It partnered with City Colleges of Chicago to establish a program in which apprentices combine relevant courses with part-time work at the company, with the goal of earning associate’s degrees and ultimately transitioning into full-time employment. Aon has benefited in multiple ways: It has filled vacancies, brought more people of color into the company, and seen higher retention rates for employees hired through the apprentice program than for those hired directly from college.
One way that IBM grew its tech talent pool was by creating internships for students and graduates of a program known as P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School). The program enables students to take classes in STEM fields and earn credits toward an associate’s degree in applied science while completing high school. It started as a partnership among IBM, the City University of New York, and the New York City Department of Education and was launched in a single Brooklyn high school in 2011. Since then it has expanded rapidly: In 2022 more than 300 P-TECH schools in 27 countries provided interns, apprentices, and employees to businesses worldwide. Employing students and graduates of P-TECH has been a key element of IBM’s talent strategy.
Reimagining existing relationships.
Assessing how well an organization is leveraging existing educational institutions and talent developers can be just as transformative as starting up a new program. When Cleveland Clinic, the largest employer in its region, embarked on its skills-first journey, it shifted the way it engaged with local training providers to build new pathways into its workforce. Historically, for example, it had hired graduates of health care training programs if they had prior hospital experience. That meant that people might complete such training programs but still face limited job prospects. Today Cleveland Clinic hires graduates with and without prior hospital experience and invests in upskilling the latter.
Retraining managers.
Hiring managers are a critical part of the skills-first equation. It’s crucial to stop them from using traditional degrees or prior work experience as proxies for a candidate’s capability. To help managers effectively assess applicants for jobs that don’t require degrees, companies need to give them appropriate tools—including standardized, job-relevant evaluation rubrics—and train them to recognize interviewer biases.
Companies can also redesign hiring processes to more accurately size up people’s skills. In many situations it’s already common to test for technical knowledge, but softer skills can be evaluated too—with problem-solving exercises, “job auditions” (wherein candidates undertake a task or project), and other innovative methods that help hiring managers focus on someone’s mindset and abilities.
Companies should provide on-ramps—such as apprenticeships, internships, and training programs—for people who have aptitude but are untraditional candidates.
Managers may be more motivated to hire nondegreed workers—and feel that it’s less risky—if they have direct incentives to do so. For instance, companies can provide extra funding or budget lines for such hires. Peer modeling, too, can encourage managers to embrace skills-first approaches. Seeing is believing, after all. After working with the U.S. Department of Labor to design an apprenticeship program suitable for modern information-technology jobs, IBM brought in a cohort of seven apprentices in 2017. A software team leader volunteered to host the apprentices, who quickly became known as strong performers and eager learners. Within months, other teams and business units were requesting apprentices, and demand grew. By 2020 the program had expanded to more than 20 IT roles.
Managers who see the value of tapping into an overlooked talent pool, and who hence demand access to it, are the key to truly embedding skills-first hiring in an organization. As Aon’s Case explains, “Frontline leaders who recognize that there is a source of talent they have not had access to are the engine. The CEO push and the HR push are important, but it’s the managers who are going to create sustainability when they see that they can bring this talent in and do great work.”
Scaling appropriately.
It may be tempting to start small and hire a few people one by one as a kind of viability test. However, the company leaders we have spoken to about their skills-first hiring efforts were unanimous and definitive: A tentative approach is counterproductive.
The cohort experience is critical for both nontraditional hires and the colleagues they join. New employees without four-year degrees need to see that the organization is investing in workers like them, not timidly experimenting around the edges. And in an environment where they may fear being viewed as unqualified or feel out of place, having a community of similar peers can bolster confidence and connection. Hiring a sizeable cohort also reinforces to the company at large that skills-first approaches are integral, not superfluous. One or two people are likely to languish if they don’t seamlessly fit into an organizational culture where their value is underrecognized, but a robust cohort can precipitate changes to the culture itself.
Companies shouldn’t expect workers hired through a skills-first approach to assimilate to their new environment without appropriate support. Leaders should therefore update their corporate norms and practices to embed skills-first thinking throughout talent management. That’s how they’ll get the most from both their new employees and their existing workforce.
A Skills-Based Culture
Fundamentally, a skills-first approach is about building rather than buying talent. Creating entry points and on-ramps for newcomers of varied backgrounds is an important first step. But by taking a skills-based approach to promotion and development for all employees, companies can advance overlooked talent and increase racial and socioeconomic diversity in the entire workforce and the leadership pipeline.
Internal pathways to jobs with higher pay and more responsibility are critical. At Delta Air Lines, frontline employees can train for jobs in the company’s analytics group through a program that sponsors their enrollment in relevant coursework at Georgia State University, or they can opt to pursue pilot training through a program known as Propel. Similarly, Bank of America runs what it calls the Academy, which provides education and skill-building opportunities for all employees so that they can pursue new jobs within and across functions. In 2021 more than 65,000 people took advantage of the Academy’s training and development programs. Career mobility is core to the company’s talent strategy: Whereas about 30% of vacant jobs at the bank were formerly filled by internal hires, in 2021 more than 50% were.
Harnessing the power of a skills-centric approach requires a paradigm shift in how firms think about talent. Maurice Jones, the CEO of OneTen (whose members include all the companies cited as examples in this article), argues that most organizations counterproductively cultivate a narrow and even exclusionary “image of excellence.” Too often that prevents their managers from accurately appreciating the value that people without a four-year degree may bring to the table, especially if they’re Black or from another marginalized and underestimated group. To thwart that tendency, IBM began using the term “new-collar workers” to signal respect for workers who do not have a college diploma but are just as talented and capable as their degreed counterparts.
Skills-first talent management will be successful only if it is undertaken as a companywide initiative. Individual managers can’t be expected to make it happen on their own. They need backing from top leaders who are ready for skeptics and willing to meet them with full-throated support for a skills focus. The OneTen member companies making the most progress toward their shared goal, Jones says, are those “where the CEO is visibly committed and treating it like any other business priority.”
A skills-first approach will yield the greatest benefit if organizations extend it beyond hiring and make it core to how they think about cultivating and retaining talent.
When we’ve talked to chief executives at companies leaning in to skills-first talent management, all have echoed the need to elevate and legitimize what is essentially a cultural transformation. Tomislav Mihaljevic, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, told us that he’s tried to make sure that everybody in his organization understands the “why.” A skills-first approach, he says, “cannot be ‘mandated’ in the classical sense of the word. It has to be explained. Ultimately the only way for culture to stick and for these changes to become permanent is if they get embraced by the entire organization, not just a chosen few.” Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, makes a slightly different point, noting that leaders must ensure that managers have the latitude and support to make the necessary changes to their processes, even if that takes time and involves inefficiencies at first. “I have to drive a culture that embraces this as a way of doing business,” he says.
Investing in the careers of employees is a surefire way to increase engagement and retention, and a culture of such investment positively impacts all workers, regardless of their degree status. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Delta found that Black employees, including those in mid- and senior-level jobs, were leaving at higher rates than others. According to Ed Bastian, the CEO, the company had tried to diversify its pipeline prior to the pandemic by bringing in experienced Black talent, but those workers were less invested than longer-tenured employees. When the pandemic threw the industry into turmoil, they felt little motivation to stick with the company. Today Delta focuses not just on diversifying its overall workforce but also on cultivating internal talent, paying particular attention to members of groups that historically had limited advancement opportunities. In addition to its analytics and Propel offerings, the company maintains an apprenticeship program to offer existing employees on-the-job training in 74 different roles. The program has seen enormous demand from workers eager to expand their skills and advance.
Bank of America also offers internal training opportunities to help employees move up. To track the outcomes of its learning and development programs, the company is assembling a dashboard of turnover and promotion rates by cohort that allows leaders to see race and gender patterns as well as overall trends. “Measuring how many people go through a development program is one thing,” Moynihan says, “but what you really should be measuring is how many people who went through that program are being promoted to the next level.”
Not all upskilling needs to be done in-house. Through robust relationships with community colleges and other talent-development institutions, companies can help ensure that people who pursue such training and education are learning the right skills. Aon’s partnership with City Colleges of Chicago includes updating and adapting curricula so that apprentices’ coursework is job-relevant. Bank of America provides a career-development curriculum to community colleges, workforce development organizations, and other nonprofits, enabling students to be hired more quickly into professional jobs.
A skills-first culture is also about understanding what workers need to be successful and achieve their full potential. That might include easy access to their workplaces and flexible scheduling. Individual companies may not be able to remedy societal problems like deficiencies in transportation infrastructure and shortages of childcare facilities—which are especially likely to be barriers to employment for nondegreed workers—but they can look for creative solutions. For instance, Merck realized that for the primarily Black Philadelphia residents whom it wanted to hire, commuting via public transportation to its manufacturing facility in suburban West Point was challenging and probably unsustainable. To improve access to the city’s talent pool, as well as meet other business needs, the company opened a new facility in Philadelphia.
Ultimately, a skills-first approach will yield the greatest benefit if organizations extend it beyond hiring and make it core to how they think about cultivating and retaining talent. At Aon the success of apprenticeships for back-office roles spurred the addition of apprenticeships in risk management, actuarial science, and investment consulting—jobs at the center of the firm’s mission. The Chicago Apprentice Network, which Aon formed in 2017 with Accenture and the insurance company Zurich North America, has grown to include more than 90 companies that understand the merits of an apprenticeship approach.
A Skills-First Future
The need for skills-first talent management is clear. Capable employees are out there, sometimes with a sight line to a satisfying, well-paid job but often with no realistic way to get there.
Consider Tony, who in 2018 was working at a coffee shop at IBM’s Durham, North Carolina, location. Every day he served the office employees who streamed onto and off the campus. It was dispiriting but also inspiring. “Coming to IBM every single day,” he said, “I’m thinking, Man, it would be nice to actually work for IBM. Instead, I have to work in this coffee shop. But there’s probably no way unless I go to school for four years.”
A high school graduate and the father of young children, Tony simply didn’t have time for that. Then he learned about IBM’s apprenticeship opportunities from a customer. He applied, did a yearlong apprenticeship, and ultimately landed a full-time technical position in customer support. He now has a sense of future possibilities at IBM. “My manager started out as an L2 engineer,” he told us, “where I’m at now. Maybe one day I can climb my way up and become a manager—someone that’s able to lead the team or lead a few different teams. Building up as high as I can go.”
For too long, four-year-degree requirements have been easy, if ineffective, shortcuts that made managers feel they were weeding out less-qualified talent. Data and time have proven this assumption false. What’s more, it artificially constrains companies’ efforts to advance racial diversity, cultivate employee engagement, and generate strong performance.
Companies can do better—for workers and themselves—by embracing skills-based talent management. Making the switch takes time and investment, but the costs are worth it. A skills-based approach promises better matching between job candidates and jobs, dramatically expands talent pools, improves internal mobility and employee commitment, and incentivizes HR departments and business units to stay aware of what each job actually entails. This approach also holds the potential to mitigate the economic and racial inequalities that are fracturing U.S. society and compromising the health of its institutions and economy.
Organizations do not exist apart from the communities and regions in which they are situated. Mihaljevic highlighted that idea when describing why he and his team have adopted a skills-first approach: “Unless the community around us thrives, Cleveland Clinic cannot thrive. It is essential for Cleveland Clinic’s success and sustainability in the future that we create opportunities for the people who live here.”
Source: https://hbr.org/2023/03/the-new-collar-workforce
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College credit for working your job? Walmart and McDonald’s are trying it
When Walmart stopped requiring college degrees for most of its corporate jobs last year, the company confronted three deep truths about work and schooling:
A college diploma is only a proxy for what someone knows, and not always a perfect one. A degree’s high cost sidelines many people. For industries dominated by workers without degrees, cultivating future talent demands a different playbook.
Some of the nation’s largest employers, including Walmart and McDonald’s, are now broaching a new frontier in higher education: convincing colleges to give retail and fast-food workers credit for what they learn on the job, counting toward a degree.
Behind the scenes, executives often paint a grander transformation of hiring, a world where your resume will rely less on titles or diplomas and act more like a passport of skills you’ve proven you have.
For now, companies and educators are only starting to chip away at one of the first steps: figuring out how much college credit a work skill is worth.
Getting credit for Walmart training
Something unusual happened to Bonnie Boop one semester.
She’d returned to college in her late 40s using Walmart’s tuition-assistance program after joining the company as a part-time stocker. In her younger years, she had gotten two associate degrees, so her children used to joke that she might as well say she’d gone to school for four years. But to her, it wasn’t the same.
“Bachelor’s degrees tend to open more doors,” Boop says. Plus, she says, she persisted for “the principle of it all.”
At Walmart, Boop stocked health and beauty aisles in the evenings after another day job. Later, she went full time and got promoted to supervise others. This required new training at “Walmart Academy”: brief, intensive courses on leadership, financial decision-making and workforce planning.
Then one day, looking at Boop’s upcoming business-operations class at Southern New Hampshire University, which Boop attended online from Alabama, her adviser found the record showing she’d already taken the course.
“But I didn’t,” Boop says. “And she said, ‘Yes, you got credit from Walmart Academy.’ And I said, what?”
Through corporate training and certificates that convert to college credit, Walmart Academy aims to get workers as far as halfway to a college degree, the organization’s chief told NPR. Boop had done several such programs, which let her bypass two college courses.
At her rate of study, “that would have been two semesters’ worth,” Boop says. “I was like, wow!”
Studying while also holding down a job meant staying up late after her shift that ended at 11 p.m. and keeping a meticulous schedule of big school projects to do on her days off. After 2 1/2 years of this, expedited by her associate degrees, Boop watched her photo slide across the screen at the virtual graduation in December.
Wearing her cap and gown, she posed for photos with her new diploma: Bachelor of Science in business administration, with a concentration in industrial organizational psychology. Today, Boop is her store’s “people lead” overseeing more than 200 workers.
What’s in it for corporations?
Many American universities have long offered credit for corporate training by companies like Google, IBM or Microsoft. For work in retail and fast food, the process is nascent.
McDonald’s is working with several community colleges to build a path for converting on-the-job skills, like safe food handling or customer service, into credit toward degrees in culinary arts, hospitality or insurance. Walmart has over a dozen short-form certificates and 25 training courses — in tech, leadership, digital operations — that translate to credit at partner universities. The car-service chain Jiffy Lube has its own college credit program, too.
“For adults who feel like they weren’t college material, what we are able to do is say, ‘You are. And you’re doing college-level work already,’” says Amber Garrison Duncan, who runs the nonprofit Competency-Based Education Network that connects employers and higher-education institutions.
Educators hope this brings more students into the fold — expanding access to education and allowing more people to achieve better-paying, more-secure careers with less debt and fewer years of juggling work and study.
For companies that offer tuition assistance to employees, the idea that work skills should count toward college credit makes financial sense: It means a student spends less time in school and doesn’t have to pay for classes that would teach them something they already know.
And paying for tuition can attract workers in a competitive labor market and keep them longer, slowing turnover, saving money on recruitment and training, and cultivating more loyalty to the employer.
McDonald’s and Amazon executives say this is exactly their motivation, noting that many people use their jobs as stepping stones to elsewhere. Walmart’s executives differ, saying that their goal is to build a pipeline of talent from the front lines to open positions within the company.
The U.S. military paved the way, but it’s not the same
Counting existing knowledge toward a degree is not a radical idea. Plenty of high school students get a head start on college with credit for AP, or “advanced placement,” classes. Many colleges also offer “credit for prior learning” that lets students skip foreign-language classes if they’re already fluent — or test out of courses through special exams or assessments.
The U.S. military took the idea further in recent decades. It worked with the American Council on Education to build a comprehensive database of how its jobs and training programs translate to college credit.
“There’s no rule about what colleges and universities have to accept,” says ACE’s Derrick Anderson. “But they can look at the person’s military record … and they figure out how much credit they want to award.”
This and other education support made the military “a powerful engine of socioeconomic mobility,” Anderson says. His group’s database of recommended credit now spans work experience beyond the military: government, nonprofits, apprenticeships.
“What I see working with employers, higher education and workforce organizations is a growing understanding that work and learning have been two silos in the past and can’t be two silos in the future,” says Haley Glover, director of Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America initiative.
What about skills simply gained by working?
For now, most of the college credit for work experience focuses on “prior learning” that’s taught in a classroom — standardized, structured and measurable enough to fit rigid criteria — such as training or certification programs.
Figuring out how to map on-the-job skills gained otherwise is the big leap.
“It’s a complex thing,” Glover says. “It requires an employer to be very rigorous about how they’re codifying and assessing, and that’s a capacity that a lot of employers don’t have. It also requires institutions of learning to be very open and progressive.”
istorically, some colleges have allowed students to present a portfolio, diligently documenting learnings on and off the job.
The McDonald’s pilot program is considering how this could work for restaurant employees. Some schools offer a separate course, for example, specifically for compiling a work-skills portfolio.
But expanding this system to the retail and food-service universe would require an army of academics willing to perform individual reviews. That’s a tremendous amount of time, and professors are often hesitant to commit — especially if it means they’d miss out on a potential student.
“This definitely is a process that disrupts what traditional higher ed is used to, in terms of seat time — credit for sitting in a class and doing assignments,” says Brianne McDonough at the workforce development nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “It’s a big change.”
Then, there are more basic challenges. Many workers simply don’t know about their employers’ education offers or struggle to navigate the application bureaucracies. They often receive little scheduling leeway to balance their working and studying hours.
“Shockingly tragic” was how Anderson described the small share of workers taking advantage of corporate college perks.
That’s partly why hiring and education officials talk about a “skills-first approach” to higher education — a future of short-form certificates and credentials weighed on par with college degrees.
“This is a problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve for,” says Lorraine Stomski, who heads Walmart’s learning and leadership programs. “What are the rules of the future?”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/08/nx-s1-4758144/walmart-mcdonalds-college-degree
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29-year-old was laid off from her hotel job in 2020—now she makes $125,000 working in tech, without a bachelor’s degree
This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Ditching the Degree series, where women who have built six-figure careers without a bachelor’s degree reveal the secrets of their success. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.
Ayana Dunlap had her dream job picked out before she even graduated high school.
She would spend her adult life somewhere exotic behind the front desk of a hotel in a designer suit helping guests, just like the polished women she met on vacation with her mom.
For a while, Dunlap lived out her childhood fantasy. She landed her first front desk job when she was 18 at a small hotel near Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, right before graduating high school, and continued to work at hotels well into her 20s.
“I thought I found my forever career,” she tells CNBC Make It.
In college, she chose to pursue an associate’s degree in business administration, thinking the concentration — and the shorter timeline to graduation, compared to a bachelor’s degree — would bring her one step closer to becoming a hotel manager. Dunlap graduated from Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania in 2016.
Now, the 29-year-old laughs at the plans she made almost 10 years ago.
Dunlap was one of the millions of hotel and restaurant employees who lost their jobs in 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and were pushed into new careers as furloughs and lockdowns dragged on.
Even though she doesn’t have the job she wanted as a kid, Dunlap found a different vocation she loves: technology.
Dunlap has been working in tech since 2020. Currently, she’s the assistant vice president of operations and information technology at the Bank Policy Institute, a public policy, research and advocacy group that represents U.S. banks in Washington, D.C.
She’s earning about $125,000 in her role, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It — a salary that Dunlap says would have been “unimaginable” at this point in her career, had she stayed in hospitality.
Here’s how she pivoted her career and earns six figures without a bachelor’s degree:
Getting into IT without experience
Dunlap jokes that she was working in tech long before it became official, as her older co-workers would come to her for computer help at nearly every job she’s had.
She moved to the Washington, D.C. area right after college and spent several years working for Widewaters Hotel Group & Magna Hospitality Group on their sales team, out of different hotels in the DMV area. Right before the pandemic started, she worked as a senior sales manager out of the Hilton Garden Inn Tysons Corner.
“I was the youngest person on my team, and always getting pulled to unfreeze computer screens, edit documents and refresh WiFi connections,” she says. “But I didn’t mind it, I always thought it was fun.”
Dunlap didn’t consider turning her knack for computers into her career until she was laid off from her sales job in June 2020.
Weeks after losing her job, she remembers sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, venting to her friends on FaceTime, feeling “anxious and unsure” about what to do next.
“I spent years working in the same industry and building up my career, only for the pandemic to put it on an indefinite hold,” she recalls.
One of her friends mentioned a free online course that she had seen advertised on Google: a 15-week IT support course fromPer Scholas, a national tech training non-profit headquartered in New York.
As part of the course, Dunlap would receive three certifications: A Google IT support certificate, CompTIA Security+ certification and CompTIA Network+ certification. Another benefit: Per Scholas partners with employers across the U.S. to recruit and recommend candidates from their boot camps for open tech roles.
Dunlap started the Per Scholas program in August and graduated in November with an offer for a hybrid job in hand as a tier 2 technical support engineer at designDATA, an IT services and consulting firm headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
While working there, Dunlap was tasked with helping organizations prepare to return to the office, bysetting up their desktops, routers and printers on-site.
One of those organizations, the Bank Policy Institute, would make Dunlap an offer she says she couldn’t refuse.
Skills worth six figures
After weeks of helping the Bank Policy Institute prep for their return to the office, its president and CEO, Greg Baer, invited Dunlap to work with them full-time.
Dunlap was hesitant to leave designDATA, having worked there for just under a year, but those doubts dissipated as soon as she received her offer letter.
The Bank Policy Institute wanted to give her a better title — Assistant Vice President of Operations and Information Technology — and more money. Dunlap’s starting salary would be $80,000, which was “competitively more” than what she was making at designDATA (she declined to share her exact salary).
Dunlap started her new role in August 2021. She’s received two raises since joining the Bank Policy Institute, based on job evaluations and taking on more responsibilities. The first, in 2022, bumped her salary to about $98,000. A subsequent raise, effective in January, raised her annual compensation to $125,000.
The IT and AV support skills Dunlap learned in the Per Scholas program — problem-solving, understanding different operating systems and diagnosing software or hardware faults — played a big role in her ability to transition into tech without a bachelor’s degree. But so did the soft skills she picked up while working in hotels, namely communication and customer service.
Customer service, in particular, is a “game-changer” that can help you stand out from other candidates competing for the same tech job, Dunlap adds.
“I think a lot of people forget that being patient and friendly is so important when you’re helping people with stressful computer issues,” she explains. “I was told, directly, that having that skillset, just by working in hospitality, was a huge bonus.”
Dunlap’s biggest piece of advice for others hoping to land a high-paying job without a bachelor’s degree? Don’t underestimate the value of your transferable skills.
“Sometimes, society deems people who don’t have a four-year degree as uneducated, but just because you choose not to pursue that doesn’t mean you can’t educate yourself in other ways and bring value to the table. You can read books, take boot camps online, there are so many ways to improve your skills,” she says. “If you take stock of what you’re good at and lean into that, you’ll go far in your career.”
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Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/29-year-old-makes-125000-working-in-tech-without-a-bachelors-degree-heres-how.html
North America Technical Institute is now accredited by the Middle States Accreditation (MSA)
The Middle States Association is a worldwide leader in accreditation and school improvement. For over 125 years, Middle States has been helping school leaders establish and reach their goals, develop strategic plans, promote staff development, and advance student achievement.
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The 7 most in-demand tech skills for freelancers—many pay more than $125 an hour
Tech companies have been making headlines for mass layoffs of late. Google, Microsoft and Amazon all announced they’d be letting go of tens of thousands altogether and Twitter and Meta both announced layoffs in the fall. But demand for tech skills remains high. “The skills gap is still sharp, it’s still a significant gap,” says Vicki Salemi, career expert at Monster. “Employers are struggling to find labor in this tight labor market” that can fill various tech needs. While employers won’t always be looking for full-time experts, some may be looking for part-time or contract work. If you have tech expertise and are seeking opportunities, here are seven skills that will likely be in-demand for freelancers this year according to freelancer platform Upwork, along with descriptions of what each entails and how much freelancers on the site are charging. Mobile app development A mobile app developer is a software engineer who specializes in creating apps for smartphones, tablets and computers. They know coding languages, fix any bugs that arise in the software and work with graphic designers and data scientists to build their apps. They charge as much as $155 per hour. Web design Web designers build websites, creating the appropriate functionality and look using programming languages like HTML and JavaScript and graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop. Web designers on Upwork charge as much as $250 per hour. UX/UI design These designers focus on creating user-friendly experiences on websites and apps. They plan the structure of their sites, develop its content, create prototypes and test for bugs. They charge as much as $120 per hour. CMS development A content management system, CMS, is a software that helps its users manage their various content, from creating it to publishing it. It also stores content in its database for later use. CMS developers are responsible for developing both the back and front end of the software. CMS developers charge as much as $105 per hour. Manual testing These professionals test the functionality of a software without the help of automated tools. They ensure the software works correctly in various scenarios and note any bugs or issues along the way. Manual testers charge as much as $50 per hour on Upwork. Script and automation Automation scripts are a list of commands for software that help automate tasks like sending an email to a customer. Specialists write them in coding language such as Python and JavaScript. Scripting and automation specialists charge as much as $350 per hour. “We use technology every day,” says Margaret Lilani, vice president of talent solutions at Upwork. “We use it to work, we use it to learn, we use it to communicate, we use it to transact.” That’s especially true of the last three years, as people leaned more and more heavily on their devices to connect. “That genie is not going back in the bottle,” she says, adding that, “in terms of businesses and their digital presence, they have to have that.” If you’re looking to gain these skills, Salemi suggests looking at online certificate programs, MBA programs or community college courses.[learn_press_profile] Read More
Washington, DC Outpaces New York City in Tech Job Postings
Despite all the headlines about layoffs at tech’s biggest companies, organizations everywhere continue to hire tech professionals. Which metro areas are seeing the most tech hiring activity? For an answer, we can turn to CompTIA’s monthly job report, which breaks down the metro areas with the most tech job postings (CompTIA relies on Lightcast, which captures and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country). As you can see from the following chart, December was a very good month for Washington, DC and New York City: Top Metro Areas for Tech Job Postings For decades, the federal government defined Washington, DC’s tech scene. Various federal agencies need thousands of tech professionals for virtually every purpose, from keeping websites running to ensuring tech stacks are safe from internal and external attack. Federal contractors (especially in burgeoning industries like defense) vacuum up tech talent every year. In recent years, the city’s tech professionals have also benefitted from the rise of significant tech scenes in nearby Virginia and Maryland. For example, Amazon has been constructing a massive “HQ2” facility in Northern Virginia that, once completed, will reportedly employ more than 25,000 workers by 2030. Maryland has also enjoyed significant tech hiring momentum, according to data from CompTIA. Combined with DC’s attempts to foster a local startup scene, and you have lots of opportunities for tech professionals with the right mix of skills and experience. That burgeoning tech scene has translated into higher compensation. A 2020 study by management-software firm Carta found that tech professionals around Washington, DC make 97 percent of what their colleagues in San Francisco earn. “Northern Virginia has become a magnet for the industry, with the Dulles Technology Corridor continuing its growth along the Silver Line and Amazon HQ2 going up in Arlington,” added Axios, which summarized the report. New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas topped out CompTIA’s list. If you add up the total job postings for San Francisco and San Jose, it’s also clear that Silicon Valley is doing pretty well despite the recent layoffs at Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, and other prominent local companies. Overall tech unemployment hit 1.8 percent in December, suggesting a widespread level of demand for all kinds of tech professionals.[learn_press_profile] Read More
